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Dec 8, 2006

The excellent blog sketchythoughts recently posted an interview with a South Asian antifascist living in New York City, along with an analysis of the interview. The whole thing is worth reviewing, but in particular the questions it prompts around the class composition of fascist movements. Based on his experiences fighting Hindu fascism in North America, the interviewee concludes that wealthier segments of the Indian population in the diaspora are more supportive of Hindu fascism than are working class or poor folks.

“Mathew explains that the Hindu far-right draws most of its support from the well educated professional middle class. Not surprisingly, this is in direct contradiction to the liberal myth that it is the “backwards” and poor classes which are drawn to fascism – while i certainly don’t want to pretend that the global far right is homogenous, there are many many other examples of fascism growing within the most “advanced” and “modern classes,” regardless of the traditionalist drag they may hid behind.”

This may well be the case, but it would be interesting to research the question more fully, and to think about the differences between fascist movements in exile/diaspora and those in the “fatherland,” so to speak. Some commentators (mostly from the right) seem to make a similar point in the case of Islamic fascism – whether or not the term is used with any precision. That is, the support base for Al-Qaeda and other groupings is thought to be largely in the underclasses in the middle east and Central/South Asia, while many of the targets of counter-terrorism investigations in the US and Europe are educated, often wealthy, immigrants from the middle east or Central/South Asia. I don’t know whether this assessment is accurate (in either the Hindu or Muslim cases), and I’m not sure what all the implications would be for anti-fascism, but it’s worth pursuing.

Dec 7, 2006

Stan Goff, Special Forces militarist turned Marxist, has put out a new piece critiquing Marxism-Leninism (M-L) concepts and models as a way of building revolutionary movements. His critique centers on the centralizing and rigid traditions of M-L politics, contrasting them with more decentralized and experimental forms of organization and resistance.

I came across this piece while viewing the blog, Red Flags, a Maoist oriented blog that is a fellow political traveler to the Revolutionary Communist Party. While I have no political sympathy with most of Red Flags politics, I can appreciate the blog administrators attempt to stimulate discussion and debate around revolutionary ideas and practice. Red Flags is also a fairly non-sectarian blog although many of it's more consistent commenting vistors are unabashedly authoritarian and uphold the Stalinist tradition as a model of politics.

Goff's piece, while aimed at the Marxist Left, is worth reading by those coming from the libertarian tradition for it's asking how to bring "an effective politics of resistance into being".

It is the organizing principle of the "Leninist Party" that still carries the day, democratic centralism, and the method inhering in that organizational model, which requires "the line", which I have come to believe is responsible not merely for a failure of the left to gain a consistent foothold among the broad masses, but which is - more significantley - an illusion that "the left", as we define it, is the only appropriate vehicle to carry out the transformation of society. This illusion is shared by many elements in what we widely call the left, that "correct ideas lead to correct practice", yet we have never questioned the whole notion of correctness, with its hubristic assumptions of cookie-cutter universality...By and large, we remain trapped in the development paradigm, which still fails to grasp energy physics as the zero-sum game that it is, and establishes goals that would leave the masses at the mercy of machines and bureaucrats. This has not only led us to remain insular; it continually leads us into competition for people and resources with more organic efforts that have more traction and relevance than the projects flowing out of our DC process, making a fetish of collectivity, and stifling individual initiative and the creativity that goes with it.

Dec 1, 2006

"we do not recognize the official president or the legitimate one. What happens at the top does not matter at all to us. What matters is what will arise from below. When we carry out this uprising, we will do away with the entire political class, including those who call themselves the ‘parliamentary leftists'."